April 02, 2016

Gram Parsons And Rick Nelson: Early Pioneers of 'California Dreaming'

Brian Wilson "wished they
all could be California girls". The
Mamas & The Papas figured they'd be "safe and warm" if they
were in LA. Guns
n' Roses demanded to be taken down to 'Paradise City', while 2Pac offered to "serenade the streets of LA/From Oakland to
Sacktown/The Bay Area and back down/Cali is where they put the mack
down…"

From the Beach
Boys to blink
182 – via folk-pop,
psychedelia, country rock, hair metal and hip hop – California music of the past
half-century has been a key part of the state's identity and self-image. There
is something about America's Golden State that keeps pulling people out west to
the sunshine and the ocean, the beaches and the freeways, the canyons and the
deserts – not to mention the movie studios and Silicon Valley tech companies
that dangle such potent dreams of wealth and stardom.

Both California's major
cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco – and, to a lesser extent, San Diego and
the country-music town of Bakersfield – offer contrasting and competing music
scenes that continue to exert huge influences on global pop culture. San
Franciscans have long looked down their noses at the plastic fantasyland of LA,
while Angelenos dismissed the Bay Area as a quaint Europeanized backwater.If
there is a single act that can be said to have put California – or at least
Southern California – on the pop map it is the Beach
Boys. Naturally there was
music in LA before Brian Wilson and his brothers formed the Pendletones with
Mike Love, Al Jardine and David Marks – West Coast jazz, honky-tonk country and
doo wop, to name but a few key genres. But Brian's early Sixties anthems of
teenage life soundtracked the paradise that seemed so irresistible to the rest
of the world.

"California is teen heaven," pop
writer Nik Cohn declared in 1969. "It is the place that pop was created for… it
has been made like this when kids live in grey cities, tenement blocks, and it
keeps raining and they know this can't be right, there must be something better.
California is the something better."

Brian Wilson, of course,
turned out to be so much more than a composer of catchy teen melodies. As the
Beach
Boys evolved beyond surf songs and hot-rod hits to the complex
symphonic pop of Pet Sounds and the multi-layered pop-psychedelia of 'Good
Vibrations', it became clear to anybody with ears that Brian was a composer of
genuine genius. To go from 'Surfin'' to 'Surf's Up' in four short years was
nothing short of miraculous.

One of the many LA natives to feel the influence of
the Beach Boys was producer Lou Adler, who hit big with the similarly
surf-oriented Jan & Dean before he veered off into the folk-pop sound of
Barry McGuire and the Mamas & the Papas. (Jan & Dean topped the charts in
June 1963 with Brian's song 'Surf City'.) After head Papa John Phillips
fantasised about the West Coast in his glorious 1965 siren-song 'California
Dreamin'', the dream became a reality as the quartet – produced by Adler and
featuring the booming voice of the great Mama Cass Elliott – helped establish
LA's Laurel Canyon as a hip semi-rural enclave for a wave of incoming
folk-rockers and singer-songwriters.

Adler certainly had his finger on
the pulse of the Sixties counterculture. With Phillips he conceived northern
California's Monterey International Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, thus
uniting the very different factions of LA and San Francisco (as well as Chicago,
New York, Memphis and London) in a groundbreaking three-day event that
permanently changed the face of the music industry.

If the opening Friday night of
"Monterey Pop" saw such polished LA acts as Johnny Rivers and the Association,
the following day was dominated by hippie-rock bands from San Francisco's
happening Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood. San Francisco Chronicle jazz critic
Ralph J. Gleason, who played a vital intermediary role during the festival's
planning, thought that Southern Californian bands were "fostered and nurtured by
LA music hype", whereas "what's going on here [in the Bay Area] is natural and
real".

Monterey's show-stealer may
have been Janis Joplin, the unfettered frontwoman with Big Brother & the
Holding Company, but she was hardly the only Bay Area star of the weekend.
Steve
Miller was a guitarist and
singer from Texas who was about to take psychedelic blues into another dimension
with the 1968 albums Children of the Future and Sailor. "I knew I couldn't miss
in San Francisco," he said. "The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane barely
knew how to tune their instruments."

Meanwhile the Quicksilver
Messenger Service were a wild quartet of jamming longhairs whose finest hour would
come on 1969's Happy Trails. With an evocative cover designed by the Charlatans'
George Hunter, that live album caught the intense and almost dangerous quality
of San Francisco's late Sixties sound. Grounded in the primitive stomping of
drummer Greg Elmore, the interplay between Gary Duncan's chugging rhythm guitar
and John Cipollina's quivering lead lines was thrilling and hypnotic.From
the seeds of the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield – the hipper LA
representatives at Monterey – came a new scene in Southern California, one that
would dominate the sound of the LA canyons for several years.

An early pioneer of
Californian country-rock was Rick
Nelson, who had matured from
teen TV idol "Ricky" into the potent rock'n'roller of 1961's 'Hello Mary Lou'
and now reinvented himself as a country rocker with help from backing group the
Stone Canyon Band.

Much taken with Bob Dylan's country album Nashville Skyline,
Nelson forged a clear link between the LA canyons and the well-established
Bakersfield country scene when he recruited former Buck Owens sideman Tom
Brumley as his pedal-steel player. His 1969 live album In Concert was recorded
at West Hollywood's Troubadour club, a clubhouse for LA's burgoning country rock
scene.Another country-rock pioneer was ex-Buffalo Springfield member Richie
Furay, whose new band Poco patented a catchy amalgam of twang and pop harmonies
on their debut album Pickin' Up the Pieces.

More rooted in the heritage of
old-time Appalachian music was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, like Poco mainstays
of the Troubadour. The Dirt Band were managed by Bill McEuen, whose
banjo-playing client Steve Martin – years before he became a household name as a
comedian and movie star – was another regular at "the Troub".

And then there was Gram
Parsons, who was briefly a Byrd before forming the Flying Burrito Brothers with
original Byrds bassist Chris Hillman. With their 1969 album The Gilded Palace of
Sin, the Burritos made West Coast country rock super-hip and influenced everyone
from Gram's friends The
Rolling Stones to his near-disciples the Eagles, who took the Burritos' rough diamond and polished it
into million-dollar Top 10 hits like 'Lyin' Eyes' and 'New Kid in
Town'.

A decade later,
Eagles drummer/singer
Don
Henley established himself as
one of the best singer-songwriters of the era with hits like 'Boys of Summer' an
'The End of the Innocence'. Five years after that, the Eagles picked up where
they left off and later made the remarkable album of new material that was Long
Road Out of Eden.

But the LA canyons were
home to more than folk-rockers and denim cowboys.

John
Mayall, guiding light of the SixtiesBritish blues boom, upped
sticks for California and hymned his idyllic new environment on Blues from
Laurel Canyon, an album that included the slinky and laid-back trck 'Laurel
Canyon Home'. Also present in that fabled place in the late Sixties was the
eccentric Captain
Beefheart, who spent many
hours in the Lookout Mountain Avenue compound of his mentor/producer Frank
Zappa.

The Cap'n, born Don Van Vliet, later resurfaced with his Magic Band on
the 1974 release Unconditionally Guaranteed, following it up with Bluejeans and
Moonbeams, an album that boasted an entirely different Magic Band after the
original one deserted him to form Mallard.

Just as central to the
musical history of California were pure pop artists like the Carpenters, a brother-and-sister duo raised in the sleepy LA
suburb of Downey and signed to the same label – Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss'
A&M Records – as Gram Parsons' Burrito Brothers. Boasting the immaculately
silky voice – and the drumming – of sister Karen, the siblings were purveyors of
classy MOR hits like 'Goodbye to Love', 'Yesterday Once More' and 'We've Only
Just Begun'.

A&M was also home – via its
distribution deal with Lou Adler's Ode label – to Carole King's Canyon
singer-songwriter classic Tapestry, as well as to Kim Carnes, who made two
albums for Alpert and Moss in the mid-Seventies before hitting big in 1981 with
'Bette Davis Eyes'.

California has produced its
share of R&B greats, hardly surprising when one remembers that Berry Gordy
moved the offices of Motown to LA in 1972.

Two of that label's biggest late
Seventies stars were strutting punk-funkateer Rick
James and his blue-eyed soul protégé Teena
Marie, both of whom delivered exceptional albums (his Street Songs,
her It Must Be Magic) at the dawn of the Eighties. Punk-funk was also a key
ingredient in the sound of another Eighties LA act. In fact, so punk-funky were
the white Red
Hot Chili Peppers that their
second album Freaky Styley (1985) was produced by P-Funk generalissimo George
Clinton, one of Rick James' great rivals in that era of bootylicious grooves and
jawdropping stage costumes. The Chili Peppers went to become one of the defining
Californian bands of the next three decades.

Slightly less funky were
the biggest and most badly-behaved band in Eighties LA. Guns
n' Roses emerged from the sleazy Sunset Strip scene which had
earlier produced Motley Crue, but went even further in the rehab stakes as they
veered away from cartoon metal on their classic 1987 debut Appetite for
Destruction. This was a very different LA from the Beach
Boys or the Eagles but no less viable an expression of the California
dream, influencing as it did a thousand other bad-boy bands with tattoos and
track-marks.

Providing a stark contrast
from up north in the Bay Area – where they had relocated from LA after
recruiting bassist Cliff Burton – were Metallica, the new kings of speed metal and a band that would
come to own heavy metal after the release of their breakthrough third album
Master of Puppets (1986).

A more radical expression
of that same California dream – or its dark side, which is always there below
the sunny surface – was the West Coast gangsta rap that blasted out of
south-central LA in the raging form of NWA and their principal stars
Ice
Cube, Eazy E and Dr.
Dre. Straight Outta Compton, the group's incendiary 1988 debut, was
as exciting as it was shocking. Built on ruff funk beats and deep bass grooves,
the album was as powerful as anything Public
Enemy were doing on the East Coast. And as if that wasn't enough,
Dre's mega-successful solo album The Chronic (1992) led directly to classics on
the Death Row label like Snoop
Dogg's Doggystyle (1993) and 2Pac's All Eyez On Me (1996).

More playful and less
confrontational were the relocated Beastie
Boys of
Paul's Boutique (1989), along with the "Native Tongues" groups (Jungle Brothers,
A Tribe Called Quest), multi-racial Nineties act Jurassic 5 and genre-splicing
Angeleno Beck. Heavily influenced by the "sampladelic" approach of the Beasties,
Beck's groundbreaking 1996 album Odelay took the listener on a free-association
ride through the maze of American pop culture, a kaleidoscope of images that
left conventional rock trailing in its dust. Beck remains a vital creative force
on the LA scene today.As gangsta rap thrived, California rock survived the
hoary clichés of hair metal and evolved into competing strands of stoner rock
and spiky-haired pop-punk.

The kings of stoner rock
were Josh Homme's awesome Queens
of the Stone Age, born from the Mojave desert band Kyuss and rooted
in psych-tinged Seventies hard rock that reached its peak on Songs for the Deaf
(2002). The Queens' sound was southwestern Nirvana
on a bed of Black Sabbath, ZZ Top and Blue Oyster Cult, with a healthy splash of
Red
Hot Chili Pepper sauce for
added melodic zest. Call it cactus grunge, call it stoner hardcore: no one else
was writing driving metallic grooves quite like 'First It Giveth', 'Sky Is
Fallin'' or 'Song For The Dead'.

The princes of pop-punk,
meanwhile, were San Diego trio blink
182, who helped spark a new
wave of brattish, potty-mouthed punk with 1999's multi-million-shifting Enema of
the State. The band was still going strong in 2011, the year they released their
sixth album Neighbourhoods.

From the Beach
Boys to blink
182… California may never
again produce a scene as cohesive or influential as Haight-Ashbury or Laurel
Canyon – or even Sunset Strip metal – but the state will almost certainly
continue to attract musicians and fans from all over the world, most of them
searching for the twin grails of hedonistic excess and spiritual enlightenment
which have brought newcomers flooding into the state for over a
century.